The Google company recently announced the launching of Project Zero, a contest through which the cybernetic security companies or hackers find problems in the Android mobile operation system. The winner will be rewarded with substantial amounts of money. Natalie Silvanovich, who works at the Google companies, write in a message posted on the company’s official blog that even there are programs that reward the vulnerabilities from Google or from other companies, many of these are unique, important security bugs being revealed as a result of a hacking contest. She also said that these types of contests help the companies to find bugs that are fixed and Google also hopes to find, through Project Zero, Android dangerous bugs that will be fixed in order to not affect the users. The company also hopes that through this project will get more data about the availability of the exploits types. The public information about this theme is limited and some significant information can be obtained from the submissions’ number.

Although the market conditions inside which the vulnerabilities are sold cannot be totally replicated by a contest, some interesting and useful information is provided. The hackers that manage to find the issues of the newest version of the Android 7.0 Nougat mobile system will have to do a detailed post about the procedure on a dedicated forum and after that, the complete description will be posted on the Google’s official blog. The hackers will have to use only those smartphones that use the recent Nougat version of the Android operating system. The winner of the contest will receive $200.000 from Google, the winner of the second place will receive $100.000 and a still unknown number of other participants will receive a prize of $50.000. The cybernetic criminality is estimated at $160 billion a year.